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Angelus: The fundamental law of love

04/11/2012

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(Vatican Radio) As in parishes throughout the world, the Gospel of Mark that reccounts
Christ’s teaching on the “greatest of all commandments”, the commandment to love
, was the focus of Pope Benedict XVI 's Angelus reflections this Sunday, the Thirty-first
in Ordinary Time. Despite severe weather warnings there was an unusually large crowd
of pilgrims gathered below the Holy Fathers study window at midday with estimates
speaking of as many as 50 thousand. Emer McCarthy reports Listen:

Greeting them all with outreached arms, Pope Benedict began
to speak about the nature of love. God’s love for us and our love for each other,
he said, "is one inseparable commandment", to be done with words and witness. He
also added that “before being a command, love is a gift”, a reality that "God allows
us to know and experience”, teaching us to “always and only want the good, never the
bad”, to “see others with His eyes”, with unconditional love.

This, noted
Pope Benedict, is because when we are filled with God's love, we can love even those
who don't deserve it, just as God loves us.

Jesus, he concluded, through his
Word and witness teaches us this, moreover; “the person of Jesus and all His Mystery
embody the unity of love of God and neighbour, like the two arms of the Cross, vertical
and horizontal. In the Eucharist He gifts us this twofold love, gifting Himself, because,
nourished by this bread, we love one another as He has loved us”.

Below
please find a Vatican Radio translation of the Holy Father’s Angelus address:

Dear
brothers and sisters!

This Sunday's Gospel (MK 12.28 -34) offers us the teaching
of Jesus about the greatest commandment, the commandment of love, which is twofold:
love God and love neighbour. The Saints, whom we have recently celebrated, all together
in a single solemn Feast, are precisely those who, trusting in God's grace, try to
live according to this fundamental law. In fact, those who live a profound relationship
with God, just as the child becomes capable of loving from a good relationship with
his mother and father, may put the commandment of love fully into practice. Saint
John of Avila, who I recently proclaimed a doctor of the Church, writes at the beginning
of his treatise on the love of God: «the cause that mostly pushes our hearts to love
of God is considering deeply the love that He had for us ... This, beyond any benefit,
pushes the heart to love; because he who gives something of benefit to another, gives
him something he possesses; but he who loves, gives himself with everything he has,
until he has nothing left to give"(No. 1). Before being a command, love is a gift,
a reality that God allows us to know and experience, so that, like a seed, it can
also germinate within us and develop throughout our life.

If the love of God
has planted deep roots in a person, then he is able to love even those who do not
deserve it, as does God toward us. The father and mother do not love their children
only when they deserve love: they love them always, though of course, they make them
understand when they are wrong. From God we learn to want only the good and never
the bad. We learn to look at each other not only with our eyes, but with the eyes
of God, which is the gaze of Jesus Christ. A gaze that starts from the heart and does
not stop at the surface, that goes beyond appearances and manages to capture the deepest
desires of the other: to be heard, caring attention; in a word: love. But there is
also the reverse: that by opening myself to the other person, just as he or she is,
by reaching out, by making myself available, I am also opening myself up to know God,
to feel that He is there and is good. Love of God and love of neighbour are inseparable
and are in mutual relationship. Jesus did not invent one nor the other, but revealed
that they are, after all, a single commandment, and did so not just by Word, but especially
with his testimony: the person of Jesus and all His Mystery embody the unity of love
of God and neighbour, like the two arms of the Cross, vertical and horizontal. In
the Eucharist He gifts us this twofold love, gifting Himself, because, nourished by
this bread, we love one another as He has loved us.

Dear friends, through the
intercession of the Virgin Mary, we pray that every Christian knows how to show his
faith in the one true God with a clear witness to love of neighbour.

I greet
all the English-speaking visitors, especially those from the London Oratory School,
from Holy Rosary Parish in Billingham-on-Tees, and from Saint Philip’s School, London.
Jesus teaches us that those who love the Lord with all their heart, soul, mind and
strength are not far from the Kingdom. Let us love the Lord in this way, and our
neighbour as ourselves. May God bless all of you!